I have had to wear glasses for the better part of my life, and not just because I sat too close to the TV. I have often wondered why in the hell glasses were so expensive, citing that the cost of the lens to correct severe eye problems were to blame. While, yes, thick corrective lens with automatic sun blocking abilities should probably not be cheap, these lens are produced on an automated machine and should not be nearly as expensive as they are. This piece in the Los Angeles Times puts the problem under a better lens.

Interesting bit of research here, and an amount that I thought would have been much higher. It is no secret that Facebook has had its series of black eyes recently (as the article points out), but despite that so many people are physically addicted to the Social Media site. I will skip the biological dependency discussion here, and just direct attention to this in depth discussion of one author’s story of quitting here. Sort of makes you wish someone would offer you money to give up Facebook.

Have you ever asked yourself, “What does Google know about me?” The answer is uncomfortable. What Google knows about you includes everything from your clicks on ads to your birthday to the device … Read more

Ads for clothing on your wall while scrolling through your social media, or recommendations for laptop retailers in your Gmail after looking at a computer manufacturer are nothing new. Big companies take your information and sell it out to other companies to make money and have been for many years. With the breaches in some major companies last year I started to review just exactly how much data some companies were actually gathering, this chart from Security Baron puts a bit of surprising light on the subject.

This is hysterical, while this service may have started out as a good idea, it quickly becomes a cash grab for greedy executives. This is another ‘buyer beware’ story, similar to many cautionary tales that can be told by the ‘victims’ and former employees of Best Buy’s “Geek Squad”. The difference with this story is the happy ending of Office Depot being fined for deceptive business practices – making their customers believe that large amounts of malware damage was done to their computers in order to collect huge fees for repars. I hold nothing against a company trying to make money, but a company that lies to its customers to do so, needs to pay up.

I am running a bit behind on sharing this, but I have seen several different stories on this report, so it bears sharing. The issue at hand is that Facebook staff had access to user’s passwords for years – because they were stored in plain text, meaning they was no attempt to protect this information as it was stored on Facebook’s system. (As a side note, while other networks may have been caught doing the same thing, the stories only discuss Facebook, so we will focus on them.) What is worse – Facebook treats the situation with such indifference, “only staff had access to these passwords”, as if that is somehow suppose to make this situation all better. The source stories are referenced above, it does not look like Facebook is about to communicate out the lack security to affected users, and you can protect your accounts by turning on 2 factor authentication on your account.